What ISP are you on? BT blocks libgen but NordVPN seems to work just fine.
Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.
I guess this is the point where you leave the general public behind. Lucky you.
Which fits fantastically in the discussion over at the San Diego Streetlight surveillance and the "Software engineers social responsibility"[1] vs. the fact that it will get worse if you make it mainstream.
Hopefully projects like Streisand [1] continue to be worked on - they automate a lot of the hassle of setting up services like this. Ideally they will eventually be easy enough for your grandpa to use.
Unfortunately the minor ISPs are almost 3-fold slower in most places, while being just as expensive. My options are between Virgin, which has speeds of up to 362mB fibre for £42/month, and the next best BT, which is 67mB for £39.99/ month. At uni, unless I wanted 30mB for a 7 person household, my only option was again Virgin.
It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value for money.
I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day. I suffered Virgin for a couple of years and it was hell.
Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.
They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.
Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.
We switched service providers 3 times during that year. We started with a 30mbit connection through PlusNet, then 60 with EE, then 300 Virgin. The only one that was usable was Virgin Media. I wish that wasn't that case, but it simply was. Internet was a contentious topic in our house, but having 7 people either playing games, watching HD movies, or streaming simultaneously knocked most ISPs down swiftly.
I'm with Uno Broadband who sell BT fibre lines (so upto 70 down/20 up) for around £40 a month with no blocks or restrictions and a static IP. No download limits to speak of either as I can easily hit 2TB download a month.
To be annoying - milli Bels of speed? I've never seen anyone write it like this before, it's MB for megabytes, and Mb for megabits, mB is a different unit altogether.
Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.